Google Analytics – 3 Useful Tools

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web site statistical analysis tool developed by Google and used by most web developers and SEO specialists to track the success of a web site.  Or, according to Wikipedia…

Google Analytics (abbreviated GA) is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a web site. Its main highlight is that the product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew.

At Wood Street we use GA to gather information about the success of a landing page or online campaign, to track goal conversion, monitor keyword activity or geo-targeting data, etc.

This month we wanted to give a quick review of some of the newest enhances to Google Analytics – specifically, advanced segmentation, custom reporting tools, and 3D motion charts…

Advanced Segmentation

Advanced Segmentation is a new tool released by Google where you can segment your data by operating system, device, geography, time of day and so forth.

With this new feature you can easily analyze various aspects of your traffic filtered by certain group types, for example, Google has prepared these pre-built segments…

• New Visitors
• Paid Traffic
• No-paid Traffic
• Search Traffic
• Direct Traffic
• Referral Traffic
• Visits with Conversions
• Visits from iPhonesNon-Bounce Visits

As you can see in this screen shot segmentation is just a click away.

You can also create your own segments to match a specific campaign or targeted audience.  This way you can quickly and easily drill down to the data that matters most to what you’re doing with your web site.  In this next screen, you can see a glimpse of how this works…

Custom Reporting Tools

Another new feature now in public beta in GA is Custom Reporting.  With this feature you can create a report to display the specifics you want to analyze.  For example, you could create a report that tells you…

• How certain keywords are performing in different countries or
• Should I target my site to Spanish speaking users?

Custom reporting is built from two areas, dimensions and metrics.  Dimensions are text based and metrics are numeric based.  Using your new Custom reporting tool in GA, you can drag and drop various dimensions and metrics to create your custom report as seen in this screen shot…

You can choose your metric options from the following:

• site usage
• content
• goals
• eCommerce
• advertising

Within each is a specific for you to include in your report.  For example, in Site Usage, you can select bounces as a metric as seen above.

For dimension options, you can choose from:

• visitors
• traffic sources
• content
• e-commerce
• systems

Also, with each having its own set of options from which to choose.

Once you’ve chosen all of your desired metric and dimension options, GA allows you to save this report for access through your dashboard.  This way, knowing the type of PPC campaign you are running or the type of SEO analysis you might be doing, you can always access the specifics you need without having to retrace a bunch of tedious steps in the process.

3-D Motion Charts

3-D Motion Charts allow you to visualize your data across multiple dimensions so you can get a more complete view of what is going on.  For example, in certain data views, you can click on the “Visualize” button and view the selected data in a new 3-Dimensional Motion Chart…

In this screen I can now compare visually the new vs. returning visitors to a web site over time.  By grabbing the slide tool I can see how the two relate in the graph over time.  For example, in the next screen shot you can see how the green and blue circles change location based on where the date slide is located…

You can see this better real-time in this video.

We hope this better illustrates the power of Google Analytics.  It is a robust tool and can be overwhelming for those new to understanding web analytics.  For more information about how we can help your company better utilize Google Analytics, contact us today.

If you’re interested in learning more about the marketing efforts mentioned above please contact us to setup a meeting and we will figure out the best approach for your business.